If you are struggling to connect with your customers, you need to optimize your social media marketing efforts to know better who your customers are and which social networks they spend their time on by conducting audience research.

Audience research starts with identifying who your ideal customers are. You then need to determine your audience size, survey your customers to find out which social media sites they regularly use, find out which websites they often visit for information, and understand their online behavior. Most importantly, an insight on the audience demographics is crucial for any marketing investment. Tweepsmap Community Analysis is a fantastic place.

Which leads us to what do you really do once you’ve completed your social media audience research?

Allocate Resources to the Right Channels

Your audience research will show you the social networks that your target audience frequents. There’s no sense in focusing your efforts on a channel that they do not use.

Target Your Audience with Social Media Advertising

Since you’ve already recognized what your customer’s pain points are, you’ll be able to create content that addresses these issues through social ads that you can strategically put in front of your customers through the channels you’ve determined they will be on.

Twitter Advertising

You can leverage Twitter through Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts, or Promoted Trends. Since your audience research revealed the demographics of your potential target audience, you’ll be able to utilize Twitter’s detailed targeting to ensure that your ads are reaching users aligned with your audience research data.

With detailed data collected from tools like Tweepsmap, you can better understand where your audience comes from and therefore adjust your messages and engagement. Segmentation allows you to target specific audiences based on a range of filters such as location, gender, professions, or relevant keywords based on their user profiles.

Facebook Advertising

Facebook lets you reach an audience through targeted ads beyond location, age, gender, and language; you can target them by education, relationship, hobbies, sports, and even behaviors.

You can further narrow your focus based on the type of device they use and even determine if the user is connected to Facebook via data or Wi-Fi.

Instagram Advertising

Your Instagram ads should align with your target audience, and that is made easier through Instagram’s ad targeting options. Because you’ve already done your audience research, you’ll be able to better captivate them with thoughtfully created captions, relevant hashtags, and content that is consistent with your brand that can be easily recognized by your target audience.

A better understanding of your target audience is only the first step; knowing what to do with all that valuable data is critical to your social media marketing success. Social media advertising is relatively simple as most social media platforms have ready-to-use tools for ad creation, but targeting the ad effectively is critical and give you a huge advantage.

Audience research requires focus and effort and the use of different social media tools for gathering relevant data. Leverage tools that will allow you to analyze your followers, segment them, and break them down by demographic. Without a clear and comprehensive understanding of who your audience is and where they are spending their time online, your digital marketing efforts will go to waste.